PLATINUM VARIANT Q3 VOTE - (Week 39 / September 26)
VOTE NOW CLOSED - SEE HERE FOR RESULTS
React with 
to vote for Charybdis
React with 
to vote for Warui-shogi
React with 
to vote for Best Friends Forever
React with 
to vote for Sergeant's Checkers
React with 
to vote for Cornered
no wof vote?
so now all wof arenas are chosen?
WoF will be Beehive
Hope to eventually see the club variant tourney problem being fixed sometime soon.
Vote Charybdis and Cornered because why not
You're supposed to press on the piece that has a number next to it.
If you do not see the pieces with numbers (that show the amount of people that voted), you are likely facing a bug, and should refresh the page or try to fix it. Posting a comment does not count for voting.
as chessmastergs said, we are not about to have the cgabot yet.
we do not need cgabot to organise forums I think
I could see the votes the day this was posted, now they're gone. *sigh*
cornered is winning by 6 votes (15-9)
Warui-shogi is highly underrated, it deserves more than this :)
Warui-shogi is highly underrated, it deserves more than this :)
Dan would be happy to hear that lol
Vote as of September 24 @ 0 UTC
We unfortunately had a record low turnout for voting this month and we will try to have the vote be earlier in the month in December (for Q4), but nonetheless a well-deserved win for Cornered which already has its own leaderboard as well as almost the same number of games as Minihouse! Its arena (as mentioned above) will have membership prizes, so make sure to play if you're interested!
Same number of games as minihouse since release or all time?
Same number of games as minihouse since release or all time?
Now that I look at what I wrote I worded it pretty badly, but I meant that it’s been competitive in terms of daily games (often over 1000) but it fluctuates a bit
Also, is it a possibility to make the 10,000 member celebration event a community variant made in a single forum in this club (and where players can vote for what the gimmick is first and ultimately vote on the revisions and final variant)?
Also, is it a possibility to make the 10,000 member celebration event a community variant made in a single forum in this club (and where players can vote for what the gimmick is first and ultimately vote on the revisions and final variant)?
I think I've said this before, but yeah I've been working on it for a bit now (not part of the CGA team btw), it's not as easy as it looks when you have to account for 20-50+ creators
Post for the previous month's vote:
https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/vote-for-augusts-golden-variants-2025
Not sure on what some of the terms in this post mean? Have any other questions? See any typos? Feel free to ask and comment below!
(Scroll down to the start of the bold text if you want to know how to vote without reading my entire post 😀)
Hello again everyone in the CV club!
Apologies for getting this post out so late; as many of you know, the Platinum Variant vote will be held this month, and one of the contender variants has an all-week arena that's actually still ongoing! Luckily for all of us, it would've qualified even if the arena ended right now, so this post can get out ASAP. In addition, as per usual with these Golden Variant announcement posts, information regarding the Custom Variants club in general will also always be listed here. There are a fair few notable points that will be addressed that will hopefully clear things up regarding recent events.
To start off, many of you are likely aware that our Variants.World (VW) submission platform is currently bugged and does not allow users to submit variants, and @qilp is still looking to identify the issue that is causing the issues on top of managing the variants server bug fixes. We currently don't have any plans to restart the submission process until VW is fixed, mostly because of the mess that forum submissions would cause and the lack of moderation + post archival tools that CGAbot used to provide for us. Of course, this project is open-source, so if anybody is very good at TypeScript/JavaScript and can help identify the issue, that would be of tremendous help.
Next on the list is a recent change involving the entire variants server, in that "common" variants such as KOTH and 3-check have all been migrated over to the variants server from the play/live chess server. There are NO plans currently to make Chess 960 a variants server exclusive (it is currently available on both servers) and there are certainly not any to move bughouse. See the full official chess.com announcement by staff member @JuditSztaray.
One issue with this change is that Swiss tournaments are currently not available and tournaments in general can only be created by Custom Games Admins (CGAs); the original tournament schedule also has not been carried over. Per instruction from chess.com staff, we will be honoring requests from variants clubs to create arena tournaments for them in the meantime, such as in this case linked. Whether you find this change to be a net positive, negative, or something in between, I would also like to give kind reminder to all club members here that the CGAs and NCV Testers are all volunteers and that we will try to do the best we can to accommodate this new responsibility...
Last on the list of important announcements... is that we have finally hit 10K members 🥳! We will hopefully have a celebration event (likely arenas) in the next few months, although with two Platinum Variant and perhaps a Festive Fortune event again this year, there will be a little less time to accommodate an event, particularly one that would be prized. Thanks to everyone for the great support in this club, which has against all odds grown to be larger than even the main Variants club!
To end things off as usual, here are the CGA testing stats for this month, with some slight modifications given the situation with VW:
https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/variant-verdict-feed
Now that that's done, let's move onto the voting!
General Format Info:
To save space, much of the info previously found in this section has now been consolidated into the Golden Variant Schedule page, which you can find below:
https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/2025-golden-variant-schedule
Please read this in full! On top of general info, all previously selected variants, a link to last year's schedule, as well as links to previous votes are also included in this page.
Platinum Variant Info:
The Platinum Variant is a week-long (168-hours) arena that currently happens every 3 months. The 5 variants from each quarter-yearly (hence, the names Q1/Q2/Q3/Q4) interval of Golden Variant arenas with the most player activity during the arena are selected as candidates for the Platinum Variant.
Winners of the Platinum Variant vote are considered the fastest rising variants and are projected to become even more popular in the future, with previous winners including:
We also have PRIZES for the top 3 finishers in the arena!:
1st Place: 1 month
membership
2nd Place: 1 month
membership
3rd Place: 1 month
membership
Q3 Candidates for Platinum Variant:
In no particular order, the 5 candidates are...
This will be the only vote for this month, but make sure to choose carefully! You may vote for more than one variant, or select a favorite to win. These variants all have the potential for more influence in the future ahead.
How to vote:
There will be a comment added directly below this post that will be designated as the official voting platform. Simply react to the post with the given emojis that correspond to each variant by clicking on them, and your vote will be registered! We previously used StrawPoll, but haven't used it for a while due to suspicious activity on a vote a few months ago; using chess.com forums allows us to verify that each person is a real chess.com user.
See an example of a vote below:
Because this is the Platinum Variant vote, only the top finisher will win and be featured in the prestigious all-week arena, starting in a little over a week after this post goes live! The polling will end on September 24 at 0 UTC, so make sure to get your vote in before then...
Happy voting and may the best of the best win this vote!